Notes on Cluelessness

"I have direction." "Yeah, to the mall."

I DON’T HAVE A CLUE IF WRITING THIS IS A GOOD IDEA.

But imma do it.

I recently explored the concept of Cluenessness during my Effective Altruism course. I’m hesitant to publish this because it reveals the biggest flaw of EA: we don’t have a fucking clue what the overall effects of our actions will be. And I thought:

I know right?

But publishing this anyway reveals something about the actions of Effective Altruists:

Some of us err on the side of action.

Whether that’s good or not, we can’t know, but one thing is true: Ted Kaczinski called this one. He said in his 4 principles of history:

4. A new kind of society cannot be designed on paper. That is, you cannot plan out a new form of society in advance, then set it up and expect it to function as it was designed to.

I really hate when Ted is right, but I gotta hand it to him, he knew some shit. Doesn’t mean he knew what to do about it, and of course “blow it all up” is not the vibe. See Syllojism Episodes 5 & 6 for more.

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WHAT IS CLUELESSNESS?

Anyway, I took some notes on Cluelessness, so I might as well share them with you.

Effectiveness - The road to hell is paved with good intentions… so intent is not enough. To make a change, actions must be effective. If we want more girls to go to school in poor areas, we need to know why they’re not going rather than just throwing maxi pads at them. That’s called evidence. Honestly, I doubt girls skipping class because of their period isn’t going to be solved by selling more period products, but maybe I’m wrong.

Present Day Clueless @ModernClueless

Cher: I'm captain of the Ebola epidemic relief. Mel: I don't think they need your skis.

Even solutions that work might not be cost-effective. If we want more girls to get an education hiring a private tutor for all of them, isn’t going to make cents, if you get my drift. So, we keep searching for solutions that are effective and cost-effective.

from Hillary Greaves

If we only measure the immediate intended effect (girls attending school) we might be missing downstream effects (fewer children in the world, more women in the workforce —> then what?!). After a while, we can see the effects of an intervention, but some are so far-reaching that we can’t predict - what if providing Thinx to rural impoverished girls contributes to mothers who aren’t present and a generation of vulnerable narcissistic psychopaths driving Jeeps?

I’m joking, of course… or am I?

The truth is that the unmeasured effects of our actions are likely to be much greater than the ones we measure, especially for a white paper study conducted to promote a product. This is because they are more difficult to estimate and study and, the future population of humans downstream of this action could be exponentially greater.

SO WHY DO ANYTHING?

Philosopher Hilary Greaves suggests a few things, and I added some pros and cons :

1. Make bolder estimates. Increase the robustness of our studies. MEGA-ANALYSIS! Pros: more shit will be accounted for. Cons: you have to make a lot of arbitrary assumptions, (e.g., we’d need to decide whether increasing future population size is a good or bad thing. Yikes.)

2. Quit trying to figure it out! Pros: much easier. Fuckin’ egghead shit seems useless. Cons: Just worry about the present moment and the immediate effects of our actions? What about our kids? Where do we draw the line? Seems hedonistic and dumb AF.

3. Ignore what we can’t estimate. Like future population size importance… Pros: Feels good. Focus on shit we know. Cons: We can’t predict whether increasing population size is a good or bad thing, so we just IGNORE it? My brain is crying.

4. Go Longtermist. Focus on far future of humans. Pros: Sounds like a good plan to preserve humanity in the future. Cons: What kind of humans will we be? What even is humanity?

In general, I agree with Hillary Greaves, the philosopher-researcher who presented this argument…. Maybe keeping humans around long term isn’t a good thing, but as humans, it seems like a good place to start.

And now… I’m going to read about Post-Humanism and see where these things intersect. Stay tuned for a post-humanist mind fuck.

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Some resources provided by the Effective Altruism nerds:

• Evidence Cluelessness and the Long-Term

• Growth and the Case Against Randomista Development

• A Primer on Cluelessness

• Hilary Greaves 80,000 hours Podcast

• Simplifying Cluelessness

• Cluelessness Paper

• Making Sense of Longterm Indirect Effects

Additional questions to consider:

• Is cluelessness the same as uncertainty?

• What distinguishes simple and complex cluelessness?

• Are these a reason to reject longtermism?

• How limited are we by lack of information? How much does this affect our actions?

• How much can we rely on studies like RCTs to resolve cluelessness? What other methods could we use to fill the gaps?